Nine Wordy Lawyers

30062012

Your Blogmeister’s Desk

I got around to reading the ObamaCare opinions.

This is not a profound precedent-setting set of jurisprudence. Instead, it is the result of nine wordy lawyers (a wordy lawyer — yeah, I know, what are the odds) grasping at straws (in the case of five of them) and writing op-eds.

These SCOTUS rulings need not be as long as they are. Personally, I think each judge’s opinion needs a thousand-word limit, and that is sufficient to detail the meat of their legal reasoning. Or, if they want to spout, have their clerks put the meat of the reasoning in bold, so we can skip all the superfluous stuff.

The only thing this ruling accomplished is (for now) to keep ObamaCare square with the current set of nine people who hold the final interpretive power over the Federal Constitution. It will not be precedent for future Supreme Courts or lower levels of the Federal judiciary, because the five justices that voted to uphold did so for different reasons. Roberts said that the mandate was okay because it seems to be a tax, while the four libs said that it was okay because of the ICC, and Ginsburg went so far as to write a “dissenting” concurring opinion, and this is the first time I’ve ever seen a winning justice dissent from the winning opinion. In reality, Ginsburg wrote what Sotomayor, Kagan and Breyer thought.

This why the interpretation that the cloud of upholding has a silver lining of “not because of ICC” is wrong, and those who think that are grasping at straws.

As far as jurisprudence goes, this issue is far from resolved, even at the SCOTUS level.